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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

`Vivid Expressions of an Intuitive Judgment'

Some
critical judgments by reputable critics defy comprehension. Leslie Stephen
finds The Rambler essays
“unreadable.” In “Dr. Johnson’s Writings,” a chapter in his four-volume Hours in the Library (1874-79), he
writes: “How could a man of real power write such unendurable stuff?” He calls
Johnson’s prose style “Johnsonese,” and it’s not intended as a compliment.
After noting that Johnson’s favorite book was The Anatomy ofMelancholy,
Stephen adds:

“The
pedantry of the older school did not repel him; the weighty thought rightly
attracted him; and the more complex structure of sentence was perhaps a
pleasant contrast to an ear saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison
and Pope. Unluckily, the secret of the old majestic cadence was hopelessly
lost. Johnson, though spiritually akin to the giants, was the firmest ally and
subject of the dwarfish dynasty which supplanted them.”

Nonsense,
of course, but one still reads Stephen and respects him. His own style, on
occasion, can sound remarkably modern and un-Victorian (he was the father,
after all, of the genuinely unreadable Virginia Woolf). He calls Lives of the Poets “the most readable of
Johnson's performances,” and says of Johnson’s conversation:

“The
merit of his best sayings is not that they compress an argument into a phrase,
but that they are vivid expressions of an intuitive judgment. In other words,
they are always humorous rather than witty. He holds his own belief with so
vigorous a grasp that all argumentative devices for loosening it seem to be thrown
away.”

Stephen
prefers Johnson’s conversation to his written work. Boswell’s Johnson has
always been known to more readers than the great man’s books. That’s a shame
but understandable. The narrative that Boswell frames is irresistible – in
Hollywood terms, good man overcomes odds to triumph. We love Johnson because he
is like us, only more so. He’s a hero we can imagine being. But his books – the
periodical essays, the best of his poems, Rasselas,
Lives of the Poets – can change your
life. His life and works are interleaved to an unusual and moving degree.

On
this date, March 28, in 1762, Johnson wrote a prayer in his notebook. His wife,
Elizabeth Johnson, known as Tetty, had died ten years earlier and he still
mourned her. By this time, Johnson had already published his Dictionary;“The Vanity of Human Wishes”; the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays; and Rasselas.
He begins his prayer conventionally enough: “God grant that I may from this day,”
followed by such requests as “Return to my studies” and “Live temperately.”
Then Johnson adds:

“O
God, Giver and Preserver of all life, by whose power I was created, and by
whose providence I am sustained, look down upon me [with] tenderness and mercy,
grant that I may not have been created to be finally destroyed, that I may not
be preserved to add wickedness to wickedness; but may so repent me of my sins,
and so order my life to come, that when I shall be called hence like the wife
whom Thou hast taken from me, I may dye in peace and in thy favour, and be
received into thine everlasting kingdom through the merits and mediation of
Jesus Christ thine only Son our Lord and Saviour. Amen.”